Who Can Kill a Child? (1976)

They don't know it yet, but their vacation paradise will be a nightmare

Who Can Kill a Child?

This is another one of those movies that has 27 million different names.  These are just the English ones:

Who Can Kill a Child?
Island of Death
Death is Child's Play
Island of the Damned
Lucifer's Curse
The Killer's Playground
Trapped
Would You Kill a Child?

The film begins with several minutes of archival black and white footage of the horrors of war including statistics from these conflicts like the number of children that were killed, leaving me to wonder if I put the right movie in.  Then the story begins. 

While vacationing in Spain, a British couple decide to get away from the usual tourist spots and visit the small island of Almanzora.  Tom, played by Lewis Fiander (who also played the nosy neighbor in Hammer's Dr. Jekyll and Sister Hyde) visited the island when he was a kid and wants to see it again so he and his very pregnant wife Evelyn (Prunella Ransome) set out on a little dinghy.  But this isolated community is far from an idyllic island paradise and the couple notice that something isn't quite right as soon as they land.

The adults have all disappeared and the children are acting strangely.  Soon Tom and Evelyn witness a laughing little girl bludgeon an old man to death with his own cane.  The couple discovers that for some unknown reason, the children on the island have turned evil and are joyfully murdering all of the grown-ups.  It isn't long before the children turn their happy rage on these two outsiders and Tom and Evelyn must find a way to get off the island to save their own lives.

"Qué?"

I was a bit disappointed by this film but only because of my own preconceptions.  From what I had heard about Who Can Kill a Child? I was expecting shocking, gruesome violence.  Instead, there isn't a whole lot of bloodshed but rather a buildup of tension and dread over the course of the film that is finally released in the bloody final minutes (although much less bloody than I had imagined).  So it's not a failure of the film in any way, it's just that I was expecting more blood.  It is a great movie, don't get me wrong, it's just that it's more of a slow and suspenseful exploration of depravity rather than an overtly gruesome one. 

Violence Rating: 3 out of 5
Booby Rating:  1.5 out of 5